The last base that I bombarded was in 0.3.52: 12 battleships with 2 green nose phasers each, 8 cruisers with 2 green nose phasers each, and 18 corvettes with nose coil mk3 and nuclear torpedos vs an equipped alien mining base (76k defense rating).
Did 10 tries, in which the fleet was reliably wiped as soon as it got into firing range (sometimes 4-6 ships survived being mostly red). Aborted that bombing run and started it anew: 5 tries, base wiped out each time without as much as taking a single hit. and the strangest thing about that, the corvettes never fired (full ammo count for both nuclear torpedos and coil guns). So either savescum or forget bombarding.
was way too pissed about those results that I never considered creating a bug report.
By now 0.3.53 did hit:
worked totally fine, reliably and as expected; 2 elite marine modules per cruiser = 10 stength; base defense 100 strength -> 18 cruisers for good measures, base gone0.3.53
* Fleets can again assault bases from orbit when the bases have active defense modules. Those modules now contribute to the difficulty of the assault
Now it is 0.3.54, and they totally overdid it with that patch:
guess they must have at least doubled the combat strength of marine modules; the ship designer still shows the old combat strength values, so I can't give you an exact info besides that 16 elite marine modules are 100% success for a mining base with 100 combat strength (20 would have been 50:50 in 0.3.53); 36 elite marine modules are more than enough to kill 3 alien home system bases in one go without repairing in between, and 24 elite marine modules are plenty for alien base alpha.0.3.54
- ship marine modules worth more in assaults
So yeah, forget bombardment, build some marine carriers of your choice and the alien bases are history.